Fw 200 Condor vs. Atlantic Convoys - Was it any good?

today's episode is sponsored by the free-to-play game war thunder which i will use to give you visual examples of how german fw 200 condors hunted allied convoys during world war ii if you enjoy aircraft just as much as i do or perhaps you prefer targets like tanks or ships warfunders wide selection of vehicles will have everything you need get started with warfunder by using the link in the description below to sign up for free more information on warfunder and your bonus later on in the video hello everyone it's chris from multary aviation history and today i want to talk to you about the focal wolf fw 200 condor which is of course an aircraft used by germany during the second world war in an armed reconnaissance role against ships and convoys going towards and from britain throughout this period it saw some tremendous success which of course leads us immediately to the overused church quote right here and then eventually it faded into obscurity so what i'm going to be doing today is first of all i'm starting out with a little bit of an introduction into sort of the german ideas of anti-shipping pre-war and at the very start of the war then we're going to go into the preparations for the battle of the atlantic in order to cut off britain during that time frame then we're going to have a look at the track record of the fw200 throughout this time and then we're going to round that up with a discussion on the usefulness and as well as the success and also the failures of the condor operations during this war does that sound like a plan to you i think it does let's get cracking when it comes to anti-shipping sort of pre and early world war ii we're in a very interesting time because most countries vastly overestimate the effectiveness of conventional bombing so that's horizontal bombing from let's say three to five thousand meters upwards against shipping they mass the overall estimate the effectiveness as well as the accuracy that could be achieved now you could be accurate so for example japanese bomber pilots were relatively accurate through these attacks but generally speaking it really wasn't effective that being said while most countries had this sort of rosy picture of most major countries i should say had this rosy picture of anti-shipping operations germany was from what i can tell not one of them in fact from sort of early bombing trials they conducted in the baltic sea against old world war one era ships that they had left over yeah but i didn't know that myself i learned something there apparently we did have some like old wrecks left over from the sec sorry first world war there's so many wars with germany but first world war um and those were used remotely steered uh for in bombing trials and beyond that of course also some limited anti-shipping operations conducted over in spain i gave the luftwaffe and also the creeks marina a less rosy picture let's say as in fact one officer german officer puts in a lecture on naval aviation at the time the experience of the last year show that from about 500 or more bombs dropped over the last year's only free hit i does consider that conventional high altitude bombing against ships does not have a reasonable effect on the target cue then an obvious emphasis into low level attacks die forming and also aerial torpedoes actually the germans started to develop that sort of interest around about the time when they actually started just invading countries left right and center but at the start of the war they really didn't have an aerial tribute that was worth it sold with the exceptions of the ones they imported from yes italy different story for another time we'll talk about that this time but of course the sort of the direct pre-war period is also one where we see constant bickering bickering between the krix marina germany's navy and the luftwaffe germany's air force on all things flying and that bickering ends up in a luftwaffe victory more or less which gave them operational control of all things flying more or less in the late 1930s for the luftwaffe anti-shipping really was not a priority important yeah kind of i mean they assumed that every now and then they would probably have to sink a ship but it was not a priority what they were focusing on now is building up the force consolidating their numbers and preparing for a continental war and anything beyond that was rubbish i mean that's a stark generalization but i mean it gets the point across and that really if you look at the luftwaffe in the late 1930s doesn't really surprise because in a lot of things they still had a lot of catching up to do of course come world war ii germany and by extension the luftwaffe is forced to operate over the open sea now we're seeing we're starting to see the first anti-shipping operations already during the invasion of poland although quite limited and then of course it ramps up quite quickly with the operations that follow out of the german invasion of denmark as well as norway and then of course the evacuation at dunkirk and then later on with the battle of britain as well a lot of anti-shipping operations were flown there but it's not until sort of the battle of britain is already on the way and the germans are starting to sync with their u-boats ships in the atlantic that are crossing over towards britain that they're starting to understand that maybe an aircraft that has sort of a long-range maritime strike potential could be useful in the future the question that presents itself to the luftwaffe right now is a very basic one what aircraft can we use what aircraft do we have that has the range the endurance and the potential payload in order to have any sort of anti-shipping capability in the atlantic and they look at their inventory and they notice that actually the only thing they have is potentially the dornier doe 26 and the fog wolf fw 200 which is mainly a civilian aircraft at this point but it could be retrofitted into sort of this maritime armed reconnaissance strike aircraft but really that the choice there is on the focal wolf because it has that range not necessarily because it's a good plane for that role and really both planes had their problems i'm not even going to be talking about the doe 26 because the germs use that plane and they realize well that's not going to work the way we want to and we only have the focal wolf 200 that we can really use in that role so what they start doing is they establish a fan of cleric duffer which is essentially a long range reconnaissance unit and that one they start training for wolf 200 pilots in there and that moves on to become esther staffer kage first yeah first six stands for comfort water first sig which is essentially bomber unit 40. and that then after a short time becomes as to grouper now if you know your luftwaffe you'll note note that the authorized strength of a grouper within a kamskushwada was roughly through the aircraft depending if you want to include reserves or not that's the authorized strength of course kage first has to go back when it was established had how many planes four of which two were not operational and these low operational ratios that the focal of 200 had at the start of the war really wouldn't change throughout the war the ratios were i mean i i would be i don't think i would be a miss to suggest that perhaps this was the plane that considering the amount of you know the role it played during the second world war and the operational usage it had is probably the plane that had the lowest operational ratio out of all of them i know that's a crash statement i would have to you know go through a lot of planes to make sure that's correct but it is a continuity this definitely continues it's so much of a contender that i'm not really going to talk about the operational ratio in this video i'm just going to mention it to you now operational numbers be low yo yeah really low as a side note before we move on also the above 200s were also used initially in a transport draw for the luftwaffe so for example they brought some of the um or they gave some logistical support to the german armed forces during the invasion of norway for example and here and there wolf 200s were also used continue to be used throughout the war in a transport role but really what i'm focusing on in this video once again i mean the title says oh it's anti-shipping right that's what we're going to do throughout this time this unit moved steadily towards the west finally arriving in bordeaux marinak by mid-1940 kg40 would eventually have multiple airfields over the french atlantic coast from there it was in a perfect position to fly over the atlantic looking for shipping going towards britain with an internal fuel load of up to eight thousand liters the maximum one-way range of the fockeable 200 was between 350 to 440 kilometers this allowed it to fly up to the mid-atlantic for a direct return trip but to increase loiter time its patrols were flown a lot closer to the european continent and dedicated sectors where it would patrol for something like three to six hours in 1943 there would also be trials with the fw200f with an increased fuel load of up to 12 000 liters by substituting the initial fuel tanks in the fuselage with a new type based on trials the estimated range was hundred to six thousand six hundred kilometers although i do not know if that includes the weight of the ordinance or not in the end this version was never built vodka wolf was really happy to advertise this range business by the way like really happy i mean look at this they had ads like proper ads in print yes ads just like youtube ads have a look at this one this comes from 1941 july 1941 in a german sort of aviation construction magazine right and if you look at this ad you're able to put one and one together i mean look at the picture of the wolf look at the icon of the ship and then it says in german based on a weremax report from the 20th of june 1941 one first 100 kilometers west of cadiz between you and me i usually have qualms worth self-promotion it's something that does not suit me but if wolf has the audacity to make an ad like this then i'm not going to be ashamed now to take 60 seconds to talk about all the glorious ways of how you can support this channel did you know that videos do not fall out of the sky like the luftwaffe on january 1st 1945 during operations no they take a lot of time they take a lot of money traveling to archives traveling to museums taking the time to film research and bring all of this content to you and editing these videos yes i do all of that myself i don't have any stuff yes the uncomfortable truth is it costs money so if you enjoy this content as a proposition you could join patreon or channel memberships and support this sort of content and you'll get something out of it as well first of all you will know that you're supporting great content i hope you agree and at the second point well you're also getting perks like aircraft manuals that i frequently share with my supporters as well as sneak peeks and production updates question priority for q and a's as well as that we have a discord server up and running where there's a fantastic community for me that likes to debate and talk about aviation matters and we also have bi-monthly meetings there where we talk and chat about all things aviation or just good old plain life so support military aviation history i wish i had some cool catchy slogan right now but i still don't because i'm german i can't come up with this sort of stuff and let's get back to the video starting in mid-1940 flying largely against solitary unescorted ships the condors had a relatively easy time i mean even the odd armed merchant ship really didn't stand much of a chance convoys were almost totally dependent on the mark 1 eyeball in the atlantic where visual detection ranges were often just 10 kilometers or less a condor at 50 meters height approaching at 290 kilometers per hour would be on top of a target in just two minutes using the free-to-play game warfunder here let's look at a condo's preferred tactic it was to come in low and fast with a beam approach this allowed the aircraft to aim at a large surface area and reduce the chances of a miss bombers would often be dropped individually especially if no defensive fire was observed this allowed the crews to save their bombs for the same ship if it wasn't hit or sunk or another ship later when aaa defenses increased they would attack from an angle just a stern to limit the number of incoming rounds and then they would drop multiple bombs in just one pass later on when convoys feel that a lot of defensive firepower and had air support fw200s would bomb from higher altitudes but rarely achieved a successful hit with operations starting over the atlantic in roundabout august 1940 the initial success the germans had was relatively poor especially when you compare it to the efficiency of the u-boat campaign at the time and this was mainly due to the fact that the crews still had to learn their trade after eight weeks of limited operations kg40 had only sunk three ships totaling 11 000 tons and damage 21 of about 90 thousand tons bombing accuracy was poor with the most damage inflicted by near misses the british admiralty was not unduly disturbed at the fokkerwolf's 200's combat debut the situation changed drastically in october 1940 when the empress of britain was attacked now this was a large ship and she had plenty of a guns as well and she was imposing and essentially the allies or the brits assume that you know this ship is big enough to handle herself and doesn't really require any sort of protection but a single connor swooped in dropped its bombs and set her ablaze although probably the exploding ammunition from one of the aaa guns helped a bit and the ship had to be evacuated now the condor did not sink the empress of britain but as the allies were trying to tow her back into port this 42 ton behemoth not 42 tons 42 000 tons behemoth was successfully torpedoed but even though the empress of britain was not sunk by a condor and simply set ablaze this attack showed how vulnerable ships were to aircraft in the atlantic and indeed follow-up attacks would become ever more successful as of course the wolf 200 crews gained experience with every single attack and the success that was celebrated by the control crews is even more telling if you consider that it was only achieved by roughly seven operational planes at a time that said the cooperation with the klix marina here was still lacking cooperation with the navy was superficial in this early phase no attempt was made to collaborate or to link u-boats with aerial reconnaissance in december 1940 the first concrete attempts were made in order to tie in the condor somehow into the u-boat campaign and in the discussions that unfold the throat is time you have suppose you have some sort of realistic estimates but then you also have completely unrealistic estimates i mean there was there's one idea that was like sending out 40 to 50 condors at a time across the atlantic and trying to find all these ships and well first of all bombing them but also tying him to the u-boat campaign but this was a figure that was far from realistic at this point in time or at any time the creeks marina also got brief operational control of kage 50 and this is going to be important in just a second but of course as you might assumed this went counter to once very specific person in the german high command that is of course goring who refused to share any of his plans like some child in the cinema refusing to share his popcorn i guess going against him was of course the creeks mourinho who tried to push ever harder in order to tie in the corners into the u-bolt campaign and try to get some cooperation going there but in february 1941 the sided with the luftwaffe in furan while no more dragon swansea and essentially told the creek's marine to give back operation control of kage firstich which well the hitler had essentially given the kefrakis marine in the first place back to the luftwaffe but even though he had done that the luftwaffe still was instructed to assist the creeks marina by intensifying their war against british shipping the aim was to combat british supply lines with the means that were available yet the luftwaffe was not willing to work towards this goal in a collaborative manner neither the amount of anti-shipping nor the concentrated bombardment of british harbors increased but even then a mass use of the luftwaffe in support of the naval war in 1940 to 1941 would not have defeated england all this bickering on site of the high command overshadowed what had been a good two to two and a half months for kage thirteen cargill here by the way did not just operate wolf two hundreds but also other planes in january february nineteen forty one kage vertical would sink around about one hundred thousand tons of allied shipping as well as damaging two hundred tons on top of that and this is of course what caused churchill to refer to them as the scourge of the atlantic of course we're so gifted an orator as churchill and with such an important historical figure that churchill is you'll see that quote being thrown around left right and center when it comes to the condor and it does make sense if we look at these successful months that the condors had but at the same time even though the condo was establishing itself as a problem it could be countered talking about quotes as you know i like to give reading recommendations with all my videos by the way sources are always in the description below of my videos in case anybody's wondering probably not anymore you all know what's up but yes there are a couple of reading recommendations that i would recommend on the condo operations there are three in english and one in german also all linked in the description now if you speak the crowd go for night cells the einstein luftwaffe as both the title as well as the picture will tell you fantastic fantastic book or you can go for a case study by chris goss on the focal wolf fw 200 the conduit war 1949-1945 or if you're looking for something a little bit more summarized an executive summary perhaps there are a couple of ospreys books on this topic as well that give you good solid introductory reading the reasons for the success in january and february are twofold first of all the creeks marina the krix marina had operational control of the aircraft and they changed tactics from the luftwaffe what the luftwaffe had done and would continue to do afterwards is essentially send out one or two condors at a time in order to keep operational ratios more or less balanced shall we say even though they were low the chris marine did not think that way the case marine was okay so we have these in these many condors that can fly right now send all of them out at the same time and this increased the salty ratio by quite a margin and also of course increase the chances of individual converse finding ships and being able to attack them then and this massed usage tactic mass usage really i mean we're talking about a handful of aircraft here but mass usage in terms of the condor was successful they were able to find a lot of ships bomb a lot of ships and sink some of these ships but when the luftwaffe got back operational control they went back to their sort of single single single flights mission single flight missions you know what i mean instead of using this mass tactic that being said the krx marine by you could say burning out their force did achieve tremendous success with that force and they sunk roughly 35 38 ships even and the estimates go from a sort of 100 to 170 000 tons depending sunk depending on which historian you look at these two months put into shadow the whole 1940 period before that the operation started in august 1940 as you will remember so it is quite significant and at the same time while they were doing this the klix marina also hoped to finally tie the condor into the operations of the u-boats but this is here where reality and theory suddenly starts looking very differently usually the aircraft could not maintain contact with the convoy long enough for a u-boat to approach conversely however newborns repeatedly found convoys in this phase of the battle and were able with their df signals to guide the convoy aircraft of kg40 to these convoys after all a condo going at 300 kph is a lot faster than a u-boat going at what like 16 to 17 knots above the water that's like 30 kilometers during early 1941 the shift and tactic was effective in the short term but the high sorting numbers could not be sustained resulting in very low operational numbers in march and when the luftwaffe got their planes back at the same time they went back to single plane sorties in march 1941 the flightfura atlantic was finally created operating amongst others the heinker 111 ju-88 and fuckerwolf 200. while finally being a dedicated command for the luftwaffe ops over the atlantic flight of atlantic was more of a political concession than one made out of conviction germany chose to let fligafura atlantic conduct a shoestring aerial campaign against a tough resourceful enemy that gradually regained its balance by mid 1941 the condors were running into increasing opposition not only had ships been armed with the clever use of more daca decker by essentially appropriating the u.s american second amendment rights but at the same time things like early warning radar systems were rolled out catapult fighters or even escort carriers like hms audacity and then planes like the sunderland were tasked to escort convoys and in case they see any condor or any other german plane essentially taught to duke it out broadside to broadslight flying next to the german aircraft exchanging machine gun fire as if they were i don't know reenacting the battle of trafalgar which i'm told is a one of the favorite pastimes of anyone in the united kingdom and i'm really doubting whether the condors are appreciating all this extra attention that is being paid to them i mean for them this must have been really really bad vibes although 1941 had started with a bang for esther corporal kage furzik it ended with a whimper because of the new tactics forced upon the unit the number of ships it was now sinking dropped dramatically the lessons of the year have not been lost on the luftwaffe in january 1942 it reported because of the strong defenses fockerworld aircraft can no longer carry out bombing attacks on atlantic convoys in early 1942 the u-boat campaign escalated with the entry of the united states into the war in december 1941 and while the u-boat crews were celebrating the second happy time fw 200 condo crews were reinforced but did not manage to do much substantial it had been a year of mixed fortunes with the geshwater expanding and at the same time operating much further afield on transport tasks as well as its normal maritime roles however they were still insufficient numbers of focal wolf 200s and aircraft loss was still hard to make good by 1943 the creeks marina launches a new renewed effort in the atlantic and they're starting to tie in the luftwaffe once again in a more clear-cut corporation specifically the krix behind the dos once again gets some operational control over the fluffed ruffy units in the theater but while this looks good on paper you have sort of a more obvious and clear-cut cooperation between the two forces once again at this point in time in the war reality and theory starts drifting apart this much anticipated intensive cooperation between the two branches was ended after about three months significant resources were invested into an operational dead end and at this point it's really starting to show that germany does not have the aircraft that the creeks marina actually wants or needs what is required is a long-range maritime strike reconnaissance aircraft that was purpose built for that role what do the gerunds have well yeah they have the wolf 200 but it's not really built for that and then they have another planes i mean yeah sure they also use heinkel 111s they use do 217s they even use ju88s for this role but none of them have really have the range that the condor has whereas the condor really isn't built for military operations in the first place so really when it comes down to it they have nothing that can fulfill this task from a technical or operational standpoint there was still success being celebrated throughout this time but it was getting rarer and rarer take for example the convoy faith this was one of the most successful if not the only really successful attack that german countries have in 1943 and a corner here is hitting and successfully setting ablaze to ships namely the duchess of york as well as the california and these ships then have to be evacuated before being sunk by their own escort ships but by now the allies were not just happy enough to sit behind their radar their catapult fighters their escort carriers and all their aegons and waiting for the condors no no no they went towards the condors what they essentially did is a successful counter you could say counter air campaign against the condors they flew bombing raids against condor bases in france and as well as that planes were patrolling the the bay of biscay looking for any sort of german plane that was going out towards the atlantic in order to shoot it down and quite a few condors were lost by this and it also really minimized the operational um freedom that cargi5 had throughout this time of course a lot of faith and hope was put by the germans on emerging aircraft like the heinkel 177 but yeah that didn't go as planned and if you look at sort of the communications coming out of flightfield atlantic at this time they're starting to get more and more desperate flight atlantic was unable to appreciate the situation realistically it had little information on aircraft development knew practically nothing about germany's industrial capacity or even of the overall situation on all fronts in the end flightfu atlantic knew that they could not achieve much with the available forces only a decisive change in the force's strength would allow it to retrieve some results it was assumed that its own demands could not be fulfilled but this was never officially mentioned going into 1944 then even though new weapon systems are starting to arrive both well i already mentioned the heinkel 177 but then there's also of course the guided bomb henshil 294 and although these weapons systems were assumed to maybe give the luftwaffe an edge now that didn't really materialize and of course with the uh landings in normandy and the commencing liberation of france the condor units and calgary first and flight floor atlantic as a whole is just being folded back towards the right as quickly as possible and they start losing out their bases on the coast of the atlantic which means that essentially anti-shipping operations are done so how do we rate the condors where they are at success were they a failure where they're mixed bag well we can of course look at the numbers and we will look at numbers but after looking at the numbers we will look at all the stuff that the numbers don't tell us as well so starting with the numbers first let's look at the overall tonnage slunk remember that these figures are always up to debate and you will see some fluctuation amongst historians so this is more of a general guideline as you look at these figures remember that the standout year that's 1941 the success that you see there is basically all achieved in the first two months and if you compare all of that to the u-boats of course these figures will appear somewhat small but remember that they were achieved with only a handful of planes and that the overall tonnage sunk by germany from air during this time was slightly higher by the way if you're interested in the u-boat campaigns i do recommend this video by military history visualized as well now that we have looked at the tonnage sunk and damage let's look at the condo operational losses on the whole germany seems to have lost an ever increasing number of corners on operational missions with these figures you can see that the allied countermeasures had an effect but non-combat losses are very high for this aircraft as well concerning losses there also seems to be some difference in how they are rated between historians for example knights indicates that only two machines were lost in 1940 over the atlantic which i would presume to mean more combat losses most likely equally interesting is the cause of these combat losses about 30 of them were caused by aa while the remaining were a result of raf and usaf patrols as well as the fleet air arm or catapult fighters and then of course also later on by bombing and against all these losses stand a production run of about 260 aircraft between 1940 to 1944. having shown that to you i don't really think that i'm just going to drop numbers here and call it quits because that's really not how we do things on military aviation history and i really think that's reductive as well yes of course it gives us an indication when and where the focal level 200s were successful and what their overall impact was throughout this time but merely leaving it to the numbers leaves out a lot of stuff especially stuff like resources that the allies had to put into countering the condors be that simple a guns mounted on top of their transports tasking warships to escort the convoys tasking aircraft to escort the convoys and then of course also tasking aircraft to strike out against condors and cargiforce and figure atlantic in a more proactive way a lot of that drains resources that the allies had from one area putting it into the protection of the condors and so not in the protection of the condors in the protection of the convoys and that is an indirect consequence and that should also be looked at the corners presence as a whole even though it wasn't successful anymore just that it was there is continuously a drain on allied resources and having talked a little bit about that i'm now going to ask dracheniffo to give us a little bit of a perspective on exactly that from the naval side the fw 200 had a lot of names when it came to the allied crews of the various convoys unfortunately pretty much all of them are unrepeatable and there was very good reason for that the fw200 had the capability of making convoys lives a living hell even more so than it was with you know dozens of kriegsmarina u-boats hunting them the simple sight of a condor circling a convoy way beyond the reach of any weapons that convoy might have was in and of itself incredibly demoralizing because the sailors who saw that knew exactly what it meant that condor was radioing their position back to either craig's marina hq or possibly to some nearby u-boat and they had no idea where that u-boat was all they knew was that that eye in the sky was sending those deadly submarines towards them and that no matter what they did whether they changed course whether they changed formation or even what position the escorts were in all of that would be relayed back to the submarines and the simple fact was the condor was much better at finding convoys than u-boats were and that of course was assuming that you hadn't run into a condor that was carrying its own weapons and could attack you directly so all of this meant that convoys had to be rooted in such a way that as much as possible they could avoid these aerial scouts and that of course increased sailing times and by narrowing their options also made their sailing routes slightly more predictable it also meant that the allied convoys had to split their attention between multiple vectors of threat the mid-atlantic gap whilst it existed and the western part of the atlantic might be quite bad for submarine attacks but at least all you had to do was look to the surface and the subsurface realms once you're in range of a condor you had to worry about things coming in from the air as well and of course whilst you were worrying about the condor your attention couldn't be entirely on your hydrophones and your sonar and your lookouts on the surface as a result of the condors ability to carry weapons and the tendency of some of them to get a little bit too close for comfort the convoys had to be armed with anti-aircraft weapons for merchant ships this meant additional men on board additional cargo to be carried in the form of ammunition and supplies for those men space taken up by accommodation for those men and of course the extra displacement of several anti-aircraft guns all of which increase the cost of the voyage and cut into even if slightly the amount of cargo that the ship could carry and when you consider that you had to do that for every ship practically in every convoy that actually starts to add up to a fair bit of cargo that wasn't carried with every passing week and then of course you also had the escorts because now not only do the escorts have to worry about a potential subsurface attack let's face it a flower class corvette or a hunt class destroyer was never really going to stand up to a shawn horse to bismarck or an admiral hippa but if you loaded them out with depth charges hedgehog launchers and azdek they could at least give the u-boats a run for their money but now each and every allied escort had to worry about sacrificing some of that potential displacement for anti-submarine weapons to account for the fact they needed to carry fairly heavy anti-aircraft batteries as well and then you have even greater countermeasures the catapult armed merchantman for example pretty useless against u-boats an old hurricane was not exactly the world's longest range or most effective anti-submarine unit the reason those things were installed in the first place along with a risk to the pilot because ditching in the north atlantic is never fun was because of the condor threat you had to install a catapult you had to install an aircraft you had to persuade the rf to part with an aircraft even an old and broken down one and you had to find a semi-suicidal pilot who was willing to carry out this entire mission and load of all of this up multiple times on various merchant ships again more cost more expense less cargo carried and of course the risk of losing a highly trained fighter pilot every time you launched a thing and just to keep it brief because after all this is chris's video not mine even once merchant aircraft carriers and escort carriers came into play when you look at those air groups bearing in mind that practically every single time you see a fighter on one of those ships that fighter is there to deal with the condor and it's friends and every single fighter that's on there is one less avenger or one less swordfish that's out there hunting the u-boats so simply by their me existence condors could divert huge amounts of resources not just in absolute terms but also in terms of directly taking away space displacement crew and time that could otherwise have been used to hunt the u-boats which of course were looking to put their torpedoes into any unprotected hull they could find so strictly speaking the mission of long-range reconnaissance maritime reconnaissance suited the focker wolf 200 if we are prepared to attach a couple of caveats to that now it had the range and the speed especially early on which was good that's essentially the most or the biggest aspect or the biggest requirement checked off right but then it was also very quirky aircraft its civilian origin was obviously a handicap and it really wasn't built for this sort of operation yes it had the range and the speed but once you start to weigh it down with you know extra fuel and bombs and then throwing it into maneuvers while you're attacking ships or while you're trying to pull away and evade and the aircraft fire that you're really putting strain on the aircraft and the airframe that it wasn't built to sustain over a long period of time that is also one of the reasons why they had such low operational ratios so as an anti-shipping platform yes it had success it had a short-term shock effect you might say on the battlefield but once that shock was realized and once the allies started looking into finding ways to well stop the corners from doing what they were doing with the introduction of quite simple countermeasures they were largely overcome regardless of the success that the focal of 200 had during the war it was nothing but a makeshift bomber whose military conversion made it overweight and it had a fatal tendency to attract structural failures the fockeable 200 had a very low operational readiness rate often as low as 25 it also suffered from very high level of non-combat losses at 52 percent but then we could of course make the argument of saying well maybe they shouldn't have been used as a strike platform maybe they shouldn't have used bombs and just merely use this at a as a spotter and that's a that's a good argument meant to make but there's a couple of things that we should keep in mind here just because it flies reconnaissance doesn't mean that it gets the information across that is the first thing i would say here it's always easy nowadays to assume okay a radio signal is being sent radio signals being received it's being translated and then passed up the chain of command and then you know where the convoys are well it's not that simple for the crews on the ships maybe it feels that way as drachenifeld correctly pointed out if a crew on a ship sees a condor they are going to be worried that that condor is going to send out their position but then the question remains how often that reconnaissance information actually worked as intended you got to consider this a very limited response time for u-boats the condor is not going to stay there forever it's just going to you know shadow the convoy send out a couple of signals here and there and eventually it will have to leave and if there's no u-boat that's already sort of more or less in the path of the convoy's heading then those u-boats are in the wrong place and they will never be able to use that intelligence information and then there's the information transfer in the first place like i said nowadays we always assume that this is very clear-cut signal goes out signal is received you look at the signal you put a dot on the map done well actually the condors show us what the operations of the condor show us and give us a good example of how this was not that easy during world war ii in his book sunken neither presents a statistics on the arrows made in transmitting the position and headings of convoys in the atlantic based on around 10 of the main reports these figures show that on average the position report of a conway was off by a distance of 106 kilometers and that in roughly 50 of the cases the course heading was off by 10 to 50 degrees and in just under 25 percent of cases it was off by more than 50 degrees the origin of these mistakes is hard to pinpoint potentially it's a mix-up of mistakes in navigation or during the encryption and it would be interesting to see similar statistics over the years of world war ii for allied spotting say in the atlantic or in the pacific after the war no wolf 200 survived but recently one was fished out of the trondheim fjord in norway and when i say recently what i actually meant is 1999 so some time ago and after years of restoration a team of the deutsche technical museum in berlin as well as airbus and rolls-royce restored the aircraft and it is now as far as i'm aware actually viewable in berlin and which is great for anyone who is interested in seeing the aircraft themselves and who knows maybe in the future with some luck on our side we will even have an insider cockpit episode on that specific aircraft keep your fingers crossed the oil and it'll happen but until then if you want to get close to a foggerwolf 200 before you can see it in the flash yourself or here on military aviation history consider flying it virtually in war thunder war thunder features more than 1 700 aircraft amongst which is also the focal of 200 you saw throughout this video as well as a lot of helicopters metal box targets sometimes referred to as tanks or floating targets commonly referred to as boats you will be taking part in exciting and explosive virtual battles and you can enter in the mixed battle experience where you can use both tanks and planes or ships and planes so theoretically you could use the 200 in this game to unanti shipping operations although having tried it it usually ends in a very fiery death not for the ship but for the condor best mark no bismarck you gotta finish the mission go warfunder adds new tanks ships and of course most important of all aircraft in continuous updates and the game features full cross-platform integration between pc playstation and xbox so sign up for free by following the link in the description below and receive your very own special sign up bonus of three days of premium as well as an exclusive signup bonus vehicle of your choice as always it would be very interesting at this point to see what you thought about this episode did you learn anything do you want to contribute anything do you have any counterpoints to what i said put it down in the comment section below i'd be interested to read all those comments and as always i wish all of you at this point a great day and see you in the sky

Channel: Military Aviation History

Views: 251,334

Keywords: Fw 200, Condor, Atlantic, Convoy, Scourge, Fliegerführer Atlantic

Id: 831kbAyx3I4

Length: 42min 13sec (2533 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021